Best Literary Fiction Books

Seven short stories set across contemporary Thailand — a beach resort, a Bangkok suburb, a provincial festival, a military barracks — told from the perspectives of Thai characters navigating the friction between their country's traditions and its tourist economy.

On a Friday noon in July 1714, the finest bridge in Peru collapses and sends five travellers to their deaths. Brother Juniper, who witnesses the accident, spends the next six years investigating their lives to determine whether their deaths were divine plan or pure accident.

Three American expatriates travel through North Africa after World War II — and the desert progressively unmakes them, exposing what lies beneath their identity, their marriage, and their sense of self.

Ryder, a famous pianist, arrives in a Central European city for a concert. But the city's problems keep expanding to include him, his errands take impossible amounts of time, the streets rearrange themselves, and the people he meets keep revealing connections to his own forgotten past. Ishiguro's most formally radical novel, operating entirely in dream logic.

A five-year-old girl's-eye view of Marrakech in the early 1970s, as her unconventional mother pursues Sufi mysticism while her daughters navigate a world of souks, street life, and Moroccan school.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest for life in Moscow's Metropol Hotel — and over three decades, he discovers that one can build an extraordinary existence within any set of constraints.

Two Afghan women from different generations are bound together by the brutal circumstances of their marriages and the friendship that becomes their only source of survival.

A blind French girl and a German orphan boy, connected by a radio broadcast, move toward each other across the chaos of occupied France in the final days of World War II.

Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana begin lineages that diverge across two continents and three hundred years, one through slavery in America, one through colonial and postcolonial Ghana.

Following four generations of a Korean family from Japanese-occupied Korea to Osaka's Korean minority community, Pachinko is an epic about survival, identity, and the persistence of discrimination.

Set in Nazi Germany, a young girl's love of words and storytelling sustains her through air raids, poverty, and death — narrated by Death itself.

A multigenerational saga spanning seventy years of a South Indian Christian family whose members drown in every generation, told against the backdrop of colonial and postcolonial India.

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant insect — and the story focuses less on the transformation than on his family's response to it.

A plague descends on the Algerian city of Oran, and Dr. Bernard Rieux leads the medical response — in a novel that is simultaneously a chronicle of epidemic and an allegory for Nazi occupation.

In postwar Barcelona, a young boy discovers a mysterious novel by a nearly forgotten author, and his obsession with the book's creator leads him deep into a dark labyrinth of secrets, loves, and betrayals.

Frances 'Frankie' McGrath enlists as an army nurse in Vietnam after her brother deploys — and returns to an America that doesn't acknowledge what women did or suffered in the war.

A grumpy, recently widowed Swedish man who has given up on life encounters a series of intrusive neighbors who accidentally give him reasons to stay.

John Wheelwright narrates his extraordinary friendship with Owen Meany — a tiny, certain-voiced boy who believes he is God's instrument — and the event that will prove him right.

Betty Smith's beloved coming-of-age classic. Francie Nolan grows up poor but hungry for life and learning in the Williamsburg tenements of early-twentieth-century Brooklyn, in a tender, unsentimental portrait of an immigrant family's struggles, dreams, and resilience.

The daughter of Helios discovers within herself the power of witchcraft and spends millennia on her island exile developing her craft and encountering the heroes and monsters of Greek myth.

Alan Paton's landmark 1948 novel of South Africa. A black Zulu pastor travels to Johannesburg to find his lost son, whose fate collides with that of a white landowner's son, in a lyrical, sorrowful story of fathers, country, and the gathering tragedy of apartheid.

A reimagining of the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet and its impact on the women of his household, told through Agnes (Anne Hathaway) and the loss that may have inspired Hamlet.

A retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man, revealing what Twain's classic looks like when its silent center finally speaks.

A Black woman in 1970s California is repeatedly pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland, where she must keep a white slaveholder alive to ensure her own existence.